CONTENTS
CHAPTER 2 / "Tomorrow, the Lazard House Will Go Down"
CHAPTER 4 / "You Are Dealing with Greed and Power"
CHAPTER 6 / The Savior of New York
CHAPTER 8 / Felix for President
CHAPTER 9 / "The Cancer Is Greed"
CHAPTER 14 / "It's a White Man's World"
CHAPTER 15 / The Heir Apparent
CHAPTER 16 / "All the Responsibility but None of the Authority"
CHAPTER 17 / "He Lit Up a Humongous Cigar and Puffed It in Our Faces for Half an Hour"
CHAPTER 18 / "Lazard May Go Down Like the Titanic!"
CHAPTER 21 / "The End of a Dynasty"
CHAPTER 1
"GREAT MEN"
Even among the great Wall Street firms--Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Merrill Lynch--Lazard Freres & Co. stood apart, explicitly priding itself on being different from, and superior to, its competitors. For 157 years, Lazard had punched above its weight. Unlike other Wall Street banks, it competed with intellectual rather than financial capital and through a hard-won tradition of privacy and independence. Its strategy, put simply, was to offer clients the wisdom of its Great Men, the finest and most experienced collection of investment bankers the world had ever known. They risked no capital, offering only the raw Darwinian power of their ideas. The better the idea, and the insights and tactics required to achieve the result contemplated by it, the greater was Lazard's currency as a valued and trusted adviser--and the larger were the piles of money the Great Men hauled out of the firm and into their swelling bank accounts. The lucky few men--yes, always men--at Wall Street's summit have always been portrayed as ambitious and brilliant on the one hand and unscrupulous and ruthless on the other. But the secret history of Lazard Freres & Co., the world's most elite and enigmatic investment bank, twists parts of this conventional wisdom into knots of unfathomable complexity. The Great Men chronicled herein amassed huge fortunes--to be sure--but they refused to admit to anyone, least of all to themselves, that their pursuit of these riches led to relentless infighting. Instead they spoke, without irony, of being part of a Florentine guild and of advice whispered to heads of state and to CEOs of the world's most powerful corporations, while all the time attempting to preserve the mythical special idea that was Lazard. They also, to a person, craved an equally elusive chimera: the assurance that somehow, despite everything, they alone had remained virtuous.
But starting in the mid-1980s, the wisdom of Lazard's Great Men strategy began to show its considerable age, especially when Lazard was compared with its better capitalized and more powerful and nimble foes. The firm's numerous strategic missteps were exacerbated by the increasingly titanic generational struggle inside Lazard between the likes of Felix Rohatyn and Steve Rattner--superstar investment bankers and pillars of New York society--as well as by the bizarre behavior of the increasingly isolated and bitter Michel David-Weill, the French billionaire who controlled Lazard and fomented the struggle from his imperial lair. And at the climactic moment, Bruce Wasserstein, the supreme opportunist, came along to pick Michel's considerable pockets. The decades of internal turmoil and paternalistic management led ultimately to the once-unthinkable: a Lazard Freres free from its founders, as a publicly traded company just like any other, its operational flaws and obscene profitability open to the world--its special cachet lost forever.
The story of Lazard has always been one of internecine warfare, calamity, and resurrection, proving definitively that the forces of "creative destruction"--in the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter's famous observation--are alive and well to this day in American capitalism.
OF ALL LAZARD'S Great Men, none was greater than Felix George Rohatyn. Felix was considered by many to be the world's preeminent investment banker. He was the man who saved, first, Wall Street and then New York City from financial ruin in the early 1970s. For some thirty years at the end of the twentieth century, he had unofficially presided over Lazard Freres, helping to transform it into Wall Street's most prestigious, enigmatic, and mysterious investment banking partnership. But on one of those impossibly close days in our nation's capital, in the summer of 1997, Rohatyn found himself at the end of his tenure at Lazard, testifying before a Senate subcommittee in hopes of obtaining ratification of his appointment to a position he had long maintained was beneath him.
"It is a great honor for me to appear before you today to seek your consent to President Clinton's nomination of me to serve as the next American Ambassador to France," the sixty-nine-year-old Felix told the Subcommittee on European Affairs of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "It is also a very emotional experience, for many reasons.... I am, as you know, a refugee who came to this country from Nazi-occupied Europe in 1942. As long as I can remember, going back to those very dark days, being an American was my dream. I was fortunate to achieve that dream, and America has more than fulfilled all of my expectations. To represent, at this time, my adopted country as her Ambassador would be the culmination of my career; to have been nominated to represent my country in France, a country......